
» i^'i!' 



■ ! 



'I'l'.-.i I 




Class 1^1 

Book 

Copyright Iv 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



The Game of Mind 



A Study in Psychological 
Disillusionment 



By 

Percy A. Campbell 



New York 

XTbe Umicfeerbocfeer press 

1913 



^ 



tf S L* 



Copyright, 1913 

BY 

PERCY A. CAMPBELL 
Published March 19 13 



Zhc •fcnicfcerbocfeer fl5ress, *Hew lorfe 



0CI.A343977 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

CHAPTER I 
Introduction ..... i 

CHAPTER II 

The Game of Seeing .... 7 

CHAPTER III 
The Game of Thinking . . .16 

CHAPTER IV 

The Game of Knowing . . .26 

CHAPTER V 
The Game of Feeling ... 34 

CHAPTER VI 
The Game of Remembering . . 44 

CHAPTER VII 

The Game of Consciousness . . 55 

chapter viii 
The Game of Mind .... 71 



THE GAME OF MIND 

A Study in Psychological Disillusionment 
CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTION 

Psychology may be defined as the study 
of the Game of Mind, as such. 

That mental life is of the essence of a game, 
or is conducted in accordance with a set of 
rules which are more or less arbitrary, 
appears even upon a slight consideration. 

On waking from the dreaming state, we 
clearly admit to ourselves that our minds 
have been playing a fanciful, and very likely 
a most absurd, game of conscious activity. 
Just as in the game of chess the hopes and 
fears of the players hang upon particular 
arrangements and movements, upon a simple 
board, of simple pieces or "men," not be- 
cause of any intrinsic mechanical or other 
excellence or inferiority in one arrangement 
or movement over another, but because of 



2 The Game of Mind 

the arbitrary but accepted chess-rules, so 
the dreamer finds himself trapped in a lion's 
den on the one hand, or dwelling in marble 
halls on the other, simply because of the 
game-quality which so largely constitutes 
his dreaming state. Lions' dens and marble 
halls, as such, of course never enter at all into 
human consciousness. At best, therefore, 
we are at any time dealing directly only with 
images or mental symbols of these possible 
realities; and, as it happens, the dreaming 
game is not sufficiently practical in its 
methods fairly to assure itself, before going 
ahead, of the existence and actual presence 
of suitable realities in relation to which its 
symbolic items may have a practical signifi- 
cance. The game-quality dominating dreams 
is indeed axiomatic. 

Besides in the dreaming state, the game- 
quality of mind displays itself with peculiar 
prominence and arbitrariness in connection 
with a great variety of forms of drug-intoxi- 
cation. Oliver Wendell Holmes relates that 
he once inhaled, by way of experiment, a 
large dose of ether. There ensued within 
him a philosophical game wherein the very 
scheme and mystery of the cosmos seemed 
fully resolved to his consciousness. He 



Introduction 3 

hastened, upon recovering from the main 
effect of the drug, to record in writing his ap- 
parently invaluable philosophical discovery. 
The result was the scarcely weighty sentence, 
"A strong smell of turpentine prevails 
throughout." He had been the victim of a 
more than usually arbitrary and impractical 
game of mind. 

In a similar manner the drugs alcohol, 
chloroform, nitrous oxide, opium, belladonna, 
hashish, mescal and many others all have 
the power of inducing in their human victims 
forms of conscious activity which the normal 
consciousness of mankind classifies unques- 
tioningly as morbid and impractical mental 
games. 

Passing over also with a bare mention the 
hypnotic and posthypnotic states, halluci- 
nations, trances, deliriums, monomanias and 
insanities of the different kinds, all of which 
stand in our present review in a common 
abnormal class with drug-intoxications, we 
will begin at once the consideration of the 
widespread, as well as useful, mental game- 
quality as it exists in the normal conscious 
life of man. 

Normal conscious activity, considered in 
so far only as it manifests itself in the playing 



4 The Game of Mind 

of clearly recognizable games, factors never- 
theless very largely in the life of the average 
human being. During childhood, games of 
active make-believe are especially numerous 
and absorbing, while later on in life the read- 
ing of fiction, the enjoyment of pictures, the 
being entertained at plays and operas, the 
cultivation of cult- and hobby-propensities 
and devotion to sports, keeps alive and strong 
within us the partly recreational, partly 
luxurious, principle of "normal" self-aban- 
donment to the intoxication of the rules-of- 
the-game. 

But the main province of psychology must 
always be not only the normal but the wholly 
practical side of mind. For this reason all 
those phases of mental life, possessing the 
game-quality, which we have so far con- 
sidered, must be thought of as together con- 
stituting but a psychological side issue. It is 
to the sober groundwork itself of mental life 
that we wish, in the end, seriously to apply 
the phrase "game of mind." More or less 
seriously, men have often suggested that 
waking life is really a sort of dream only. 
Nevertheless it is not by means of such an- 
alysis that we wish to bring sober thinking 
under the category of games. Granting the 



Introduction 5 

practically substantial quality of our waking 
consciousness, we do not need on that account 
to deny the existence therewith of rules curi- 
ously governing it. We need only demand 
that its rules be somehow productive of 
practical results. The science of mathemat- 
ics carries out its operations by means of 
symbols, and therefore partakes of the game- 
quality. Its rules, however, are practical 
or good rules. Whence mathematics is a 
practical science. In the same way, mind 
carries out, as we believe, even its most serious 
operations by help only of symbolic bodily 
activities. But the characteristic game- 
scheme of the latter is the handiwork of 
practical organic evolution. Whence mental 
life partakes richly of the quality of practi- 
cality, and should by no means be character- 
ized as a dream. 

To give now a suggestion as to the contents 
of the succeeding chapters, we may say that 
for the main they will deal directly with the 
problem of the nature of mind, but that the 
evolutional problem of How the Body Has a 
Mind will also now and then claim a moment's 
attention. Our discussion of the problem 
of the nature of mind will take on a double 



6 The Game of Mind 

aspect. The first necessity will be to make 
clear that mental life in detail does possess 
the game-quality; and the second will be to 
demonstrate that the existence of this quality 
has not been given its due weight and signifi- 
cance in theoretical psychology. Just as a 
boy, playing much with tin soldiers, and 
always making believe that they possess the 
various qualities of human soldiers, may in 
time become an incompetent judge of just 
what qualities his tin soldiers, as such, do 
possess, so our psychological thinkers have, 
as we believe, lost, or rather have never at- 
tained to, the art of analyzing correctly those 
attributes which belong to the human mind 
itself. Thoroughgoing psychological disillu- 
sionment, therefore, is our general aim, and 
such disillusionment lies, we believe, in the 
direction of physiological or mechanistic 
psychology. Accordingly the chapters to 
which we proceed are to be devoted directly 
to a practical development of the mechanistic 
doctrine. 



CHAPTER II 



THE GAME OF SEEING 



In our search after the game-quality which 
permeates all normal phases of consciousness, 
and which has been and is the occasion of 
unnecessary mysteries and false theories in 
psychology, we will take as starting-point 
ocular vision, in its physiological and intro- 
spective aspects. 

The adage that seeing is believing makes 
it plain that sight insinuates itself with pecu- 
liar effectiveness into our conscious lives. 
We plainly have the feeling that its dealings 
with us are all open and aboveboard. This 
feeling is to a degree well founded. Rela- 
tively to our other types of sense-perception, 
sight is an affair of rich and clean-cut detail. 
Such being the case, it will be psychologically 
a most salutary step to force ourselves to 
the direct recognition of how greatly vision 
is controlled and constituted by rules and 
mere make-believes of the visual game. 
7 



8 The Game of Mind 

When we look at a landscape a perfectly 
concrete sense of distance impresses itself 
upon our consciousness. Nevertheless the 
definite visual entity which we can actually 
call our own is no more a remote object to us 
than is the chemically active image on a 
camera-plate a remote object to it. What 
we see depends immediately not at all upon 
the existence of a real landscape, but entirely 
upon the physical condition of the retinas 
at the instant. Supposing then, as is the 
case, that we seem to see a world of things as 
remote or distant from us, it follows that 
this remarkable phenomenon of seeing results 
somehow from our trained sense in illusion 
and make-believe. 

William James, in the Preface to his 
Psychology, speaks of his chapter on Space- 
perception as a "terrible thing." What 
might suffice to make it a terrible thing is the 
fact that in reality we do not perceive space 
at all, but only make believe and tell our- 
selves that we do. If a boy were to attempt 
a serious treatise explanatory of how the 
cholera had decimated his army of tin soldiers, 
he would indeed make a terrible thing of the 
self-imposed and fanciful task. But, as it 
happens, the discussion of space-perception 



The Game of Seeing 9 

remains a terrible thing even when considered 
from the correct standpoint of its being a 
game of mind; terrible, at any rate, in its 
antagonism to the common-sense dictates of 
direct introspection. Professor James's chap- 
ter is one of real enlightenment. Briefly 
stated, the visual sense of remoteness is 
based principally upon activities of the nerves 
and muscles of ocular accommodation; but 
besides this the brightness and general ap- 
pearance of objects, their apparent size, 
etc., also enter into the symbolic equation 
of remoteness on the mental side. 

With this surprising state of things staring 
us out of psychological countenance, it is 
necessary to admit that the art of introspec- 
tion is theoretically, though not to the same 
extent practically, much at fault. Practi- 
cally the results largely justify the rules of 
the game. Our shorthand psychology, as 
it may be styled, is not only fairly effective 
in its quick approximations to the facts, but, 
in at least some shorthand form, seems 
indispensable in everyday living. Seriously 
to study the nature of mind, however, re- 
quires that a mental tin soldier, so to speak, 
be recognized as such in whatever disguise 
it may be successfully parading. In this 



io The Game of Mind 

way, little by little, as we proceed in our 
study of the game of mind, our discovery of 
a whole regiment of these mental tin soldiers 
will allow us to overcome our allegiance to 
much absurd and false psychological theory. 
In the present connection we are now pre- 
pared, when unsophisticated reasoning would 
tell us that a camera, for example, cannot see, 
to make reply, "Neither can a man see in 
the impossible sense in which that mental 
game is surprisingly conceived by everyday, 
shorthand psychology." 

Another and well-known fact in connection 
with vision is the inverted, and of course 
doubled, condition of our retinal images of 
objects. This condition certainly is a most 
curious one, and naturally suggests the ex- 
periment of attempting to induce our minds 
to perceive things thus upside down and 
double. As it happens, however, this ex- 
periment seems altogether doomed to failure. 
By some deep-seated, corrective process, not 
open apparently to introspective control or 
even analysis, we persistently see things 
upright and single as they really are. 

Thus the domination in things visual of 
(good) rules of the game is again made mani- 
fest, while the introspective faculty is again 



The Game of Seeing n 

seen to be theoretically weak and faulty. 
This impotence of direct introspection in 
connection with visual perception has an 
analogue, which we may mention in passing, 
in the ignorance of the average user of the 
opera-glass as to its structure and theory of 
operation. In this latter instance the play 
is the thing, not the properties of flint glass 
or the theory of lensic images. Similarly in 
life the business of the game of mind is to 
know not itself but the practical matters of 
the moment. Hence it happens that a real 
analytic study of the game of seeing, or of 
the game of mind in any one of its phases* 
becomes, from its teleological foreignness 
to our everyday standard of thought, a 
"terrible thing." 

As before seen, those nervous and other 
processes in the eye and brain and body 
which are habitually excited into being in 
the organic complex of man by the fact of 
remoteness of objects are just those elements 
out of which the game of seeing constructs 
its visual equivalent of remoteness in the 
concrete. Likewise the symbolic equivalents 
for visual uprightness and visual singleness 
are the habitual bodily accompaniments of 
objective uprightness and singleness, irre- 



12 The Game of Mind 

spective of whether these processes are 
themselves either upright or single when 
considered as objects or processes. Mind 
is not a workshop wherein the qualities of 
things are manufactured and marshaled 
each in its own substance, but it is a device 
for doing just that thing with the symbolic 
representations of those qualities. Now 
there are practical reasons why representa- 
tions — as is seen in the case of mathematical 
symbols — are not in the least duplicates or 
models of the things they symbolize. 

The topsy-turvy state of things which the 
inverted retinal images signalize has its 
analogue in the illusion to which we have all 
been victims, at some time, when seated in a 
stationary railroad-train alongside of which 
another train has slowly started into motion. 
For the moment the illusion has been perfect 
that our own train and ourselves were moving. 
The difference between this experience and 
those of the game of seeing is that the one 
quickly finds a corrective for itself, while the 
others never do. A second difference is that 
whereas it would be equally possible for our 
own train to be moving in place of stationary, 
it is absolutely impossible for the qualities 
of objects themselves, rather than symbolic 



The Game of Seeing 13 

representations of them, to enter into our 
minds. We may add that besides possessing 
the advantage of cosmic possibility, these 
symbolic equivalents are such as to serve 
well the required purposes of mind. At the 
same time, however, we all stand in need, on 
the theoretical side, of a psychological awak- 
ening or disillusionment vastly more sur- 
prising and enlightening than that of the 
illusioned passenger who comes suddenly to 
the realization that his unquestioned infer- 
ence has been just wrong. The task at hand 
is that of relegating to the domain of illusion 
and make-believe the whole surprising ap- 
pearance of extramechanistic mental reality 
and function to which everyday psychology 
still surrenders itself so easily. 

Passing to other details of visual percep- 
tion, the game-quality still reveals itself. A 
case in point is the appearance of solidity 
which belongs so fundamentally to our visual 
pictures of three-dimensional objects. This 
particular item of the visual game-quality 
exhibits itself in its true character with fine 
effect in the insinuating solidity of stereo- 
scopic pictures. Another instance of the 
game-quality occurs in the important realm 
of pictures. The art of portraying the world 



14 The Game of Mind 

of solid objects upon plane surfaces, and the 
complementary art or faculty of interpreting 
these portrayals according to the intent of 
their makers, are thoroughgoing examples of 
trained illusion and make-believe. Picture- 
making and picture-interpreting are games 
in make-believe which apparently are quite 
foreign to the animal mind, and whose culti- 
vation even by the races of men is not quite 
universal, since our pictures fail to convey 
their intended meanings to the lowest types 
of savages. 

Lastly we will mention the clear type of 
game-quality which belongs to the field of 
the optical illusions. Of optical illusions we 
may say that nothing is more perplexing to 
everyday, shorthand psychology, yet more 
enlightening to a scientific, thoroughgoing 
psychology. For shorthand psychology 
would have us believe that what we see neces- 
sarily exists as such outside ourselves. Sci- 
entific psychology, on the other hand, insists 
that visual perception is immediately in and 
of ourselves, the outside world being separate 
in its phenomena, and standing only sparingly 
related to the passing phases of our visual 
content. 

To sum up, the commonplace point of view 



The Game of Seeing 15 

that seeing and seeming is a good and sound 
basis for psychological belief and psychologi- 
cal theory is rudely discredited by numerous 
surprising and disconcerting facts in the 
domain of visual perception. So far as 
concerns visual perception, at any rate, the 
ultramechanism of everyday psychology 
may be regarded as identical with the impos- 
sible suggestions of illusion and make-believe. 



CHAPTER III 

THE GAME OF THINKING 

The famous theorem of Descartes, "I 
think, therefore I am," may be accepted as 
sound mechanistic doctrine as far as it goes, 
though not propounded by him as such. To 
complete the theorem in mechanistic terms re- 
quires the following expansion: "I think, 
therefore, indeed, I exist as a representative 
of the very highest type of evolutional 
mechanism." 

It is to the support and discussion of this 
expression of the mechanistic doctrine that 
our study of the game of mind now leads us. 
In other words, our general standpoint is to 
be that mind circumvents the uniform 
physical laws of the cosmos to appearance 
only, or merely in so far as our everyday, 
shorthand psychological theory is a thing 
of demonstrable illusions. 

In speaking of the achievements of mind, 
we are apt to think of all mechanisms as 

16 



The Game of Thinking 17 

suitably qualified only when spoken of as 
"mere" machines. As a matter of fact, 
however, the derogatory epithet "mere," 
as applied to an example of a high type of 
evolutional mechanism — i.e., organism — is 
not a little ambiguous. Machines, as manu- 
factured by man in his workshops, may 
indeed be spoken of as mere machines, though 
most of us who feel justified in thus speaking 
of them are not able ourselves to conceive and 
invent a first-class example of even that type 
of mechanism. But an evolutional mecha- 
nism, existing as a resultant of a world-old 
process of natural development, is not only 
not susceptible of invention by any one of us, 
but is also so far from being a thing capable 
of easy description that it may be regarded 
as a fairly inexhaustible field of discovery 
for the physiologists, anatomists and histolo- 
gists of the present and future times. Ac- 
cordingly, though we do suppose man to be 
a pure mechanism, he cannot be fairly 
spoken of as a mere machine. 

Now an unabridged dictionary has the 
distinction, as it seems to me, of being the 
greatest of all monuments to the genius of 
mind. As such, it necessarily reveals much 
of man's mental character and manner of 



1 8 The Game of Mind 

being. Let us, therefore, designate man as a 
"living dictionary," and see what we are 
able to learn from this analogical conception. 
As a living dictionary, man never defines 
or discusses a word except in terms of other 
words. Or, if not in terms of other words, 
then in terms of pictures, etc. A partly 
personal incident may serve to bring this 
most fundamental truth of the game of 
thinking home to us. An old man, seated 
beside me in a car, peevishly complains that 
I am crowding him rudely and unjustifiably. 
A companion of mine suggests that I get him 
to "write it down on paper." A second 
would also have him "draw a picture of it." 
Now these side remarks, while subject to 
discount in their practical bearing, neverthe- 
less contain, if viewed from our present 
standpoint, a very world of suggestive 
psychological meaning. Briefly stated, the 
meaning is that the beginning and end of the 
game of thinking is a purely dictionary-wise 
defining or discussing of something in a 
variety of ways: namely, in the form of 
words — spoken, written, or suppressed under 
the breath ; of sketches — whether upon paper 
or in suppressed bodily tendencies; of ges- 
tures; of grimaces; and finally in the form of 



The Game of Thinking 19 

other more or less obscure activities of the 
body. 

Now that this is a fair statement of the 
nature of the human game of thinking is, I 
believe, demonstrable. We think of a thing, 
not by means of the thing itself, but by the 
introduction of something else, which in turn 
has to be thought of in the same way. Even 
a philosopher never escapes this grim neces- 
sity of adding link after link to his conceptual 
chain with no possibility of finally settling 
the burden of meaning upon any one link 
whatsoever. Theoretically, at any rate, the 
game of thinking is a chain of links which 
simply will not come to an end, because each 
new link requires an additional link to which 
it can cling for support and from which it 
can borrow a meaning. In practice, how- 
ever, a chain of thought is generally aban- 
doned almost as soon as begun. For the 
game of thinking is only a means to an end; 
namely, the association of what is strange 
with what is familiar. Now the things which 
are "familiar" are legion. For example, to 
the student consulting the dictionary for the 
meaning of the word ' ' propolis, ' ' the definition 
' ' bee-glue ' ' is such a mental link of familiarity. 
At this point his momentary chain of thought 



20 The Game of Mind 

naturally breaks itself off short. Funda- 
mentally, however, he does this only on the 
practical basis of having been over some of 
the ground before. For what, according to 
the game of thinking, is bee-glue ? Evidently 
nothing at all so long as it remains unlinked 
in thought with other somethings. As it 
happens, however, the "familiar" term bee- 
glue is itself definable in terms of other things 
only to a very limited extent. The theo- 
retically infinite chain of thought quickly 
breaks down for want of suitable material. 
Beyond a certain point chemistry and the 
other sciences keep silence regarding the 
nature of bee-glue, — a silence which is 
observed in the case of all things else as well. 
Dictionary- wise, then, a man in his game 
of thinking continually keeps shifting the 
burden of meaning from one element on to 
the next, and never for a moment halts in 
this operation with the object of analyzing 
any single element as such. Consequently 
it is only chains of elements which make up 
the game of thinking, these chains losing all 
semblance of the mental quality immediately 
they are too fully resolved elementally. Let 
us note this as fundamental fact number 
one of the game of thinking. Fundamental 



The Game of Thinking 21 

fact number two is the well-known psycho- 
physiological truth that special bodily activi- 
ties exist which can at all times be put in 
one-to-one correspondence with the elements 
of the game of thinking, and which, therefore, 
can serve as symbolic equivalents of the 
things, qualities and relations with which that 
game supposedly concerns itself. Thirdly, 
we have the fact that symbols are in practice 
the only type of reality which lends itself 
naturally to useful, general schemes of 
grouping or association. And, fourthly, we 
have the indubitable fact that purely sym- 
bolic representations of things do find en- 
trance and useful office in the activities of the 
mind. Singly and in combination these 
four fundamental facts point directly and 
unavoidably to the conclusion that the game 
of mind finds in the wealth of bodily activity 
and deportment of man precisely those 
elements which are necessary and sufficient 
for the make-up of its own peculiar system 
of fragmentary but multitudinous chains of 
thought. 

On the basis of this general conclusion, 
the analogical conception of man as a living 
dictionary becomes a definitely analyzable 
one. On the one hand, we have things, 



22 The Game of Mind 

qualities and relations symbolized in the 
game of mind by bodily processes, and on the 
other hand, the very same realities are sym- 
bolized in the dictionary by two-dimensional 
characters done in printer's ink upon white 
paper. In all seriousness, moreover, we are 
able to say that any book composed and 
printed in accordance with the workings of 
the human mind has stamped upon it a 
definite impress of that mind. Were such 
not the case, the inverse influence of the 
book upon the minds of its readers the world 
over would be inexplicable. A piece of steel 
does not impart magnetism to anything 
unless it has first received a magnetization 
of its own. Similarly a book is able to 
dictate the play of mind in its readers only 
by virtue of the fact that the material of the 
book has itself been previously " mentalized," 
so to speak, through the intellectual efforts 
of its author. 

We are now in a position to disillusion 
ourselves of much false psychological doc- 
trine. In the light of man as a " dictionary 
set in motion," our everyday, shorthand 
psychology becomes analyzable very largely 
into the sort of make-believe that governs a 
boy in his play with tin soldiers. That 



The Game of Thinking 23 

peculiar illumination, in the light of which 
mind fancies that it takes direct cognizance 
of things, qualities and relations, is seen to 
be an illumination lent merely by the rules 
of the game. Does man define, describe, 
discuss — atoms, the solar system, X rays, 
history, philosophy, time, space, right, 
wrong, mind, consciousness? So does the 
dictionary and other books. Can a man in 
his game of thinking make use of symbols 
for his own body, mind, his game of thinking 
itself? So does the dictionary, in its game 
of defining, employ symbols for its own parts 
and entity, i.e., paper, printer's ink, letters, 
words, sentences, a dictionary. Does man 
create books? So do books impress them- 
selves indelibly upon the minds of reading 
millions. To suppose that books are the 
creation of man's intellect, but that man's 
intellect exists independently of the creative 
power of books, is equally absurd to suppos- 
ing that in the natural order of things the 
hen came first and the hen's egg only after- 
wards. 

In closing this chapter on the game of 
thinking, it is only fair to state wherein we 
consider ourselves to be laboring under a 
difficulty. As distinguished from perceiv- 



24 The Game of Mind 

ing, feeling, knowing and willing, thinking 
constitutes but a single phase of the gen- 
eral game of mind. Properly treated, the 
game of mind should be discussed in every- 
one of its phases simultaneously. To 
treat of them successively is much like try- 
ing to obtain a stereoscopic perspective by 
looking first at the right-hand view of a 
stereoscopic picture, and then afterwards at 
the left-hand view. The effect is indeed 
obtainable through agility and practice by 
this method, but the novice and the impatient 
are sure to miss the effect altogether. Could 
the games of perceiving, feeling, thinking, 
knowing and willing all be viewed simulta- 
neously in the mechanistic stereoscope we 
should not only save ourselves much labor 
in the attempt to unite the separate phases 
by artifice, but the final effect would no 
doubt appear far clearer and stronger. As 
it is, however, the necessity for discussing 
one phase of the game of mind at a time 
seems to be fairly unavoidable. 

In view of this situation, it is only nat- 
ural that the reader should already have 
observed a certain lack of psychological 
solidity in our treatment, and be in a mood 
to ask embarrassing questions. For exam- 



The Game of Thinking 25 

pie, "If man is a mechanism, then what are 
pleasure, pain, remembrance?" Or again, 
"Is it not absurd to suppose that a form of 
mechanism should ever be able to discover 
and 'know' that it is just that thing and 
nothing else?" Or, more generally, "How 
is it possible to imagine that a mechanism, 
with nothing but symbolic physiological 
activities by way of mind-stuff, is able to 
concern itself with knowledge at all?" 

In reply to such questions as these we can 
say at this point only that they require for 
their consideration a recourse to phases of 
the game of mind, evolutional as well as 
individual, which we can discuss only in 
their proper chapters. For the present, 
however, we can, in the next chapter, give 
our attention to the Game of Knowing. 
The discussion of that phase of the game of 
mind should serve to clear up the general 
situation considerably. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE GAME OF KNOWING 

On the basis of our everyday, shorthand 
psychology, knowing is a faculty of the mind 
which concerns itself with things, qualities 
and relations first-hand or without the use 
of symbolism or make-believe. Our analysis 
of the elements of the game of thinking, 
however, has shown the absurdity of this 
situation. Returning to our interpretation 
of thinking man as a living dictionary, it is 
seen at once that our game of knowing is 
simply a particular linking or associating by 
succession of the symbolic equivalent of one 
thing with the symbolic equivalents of one 
or more other things. Theoretically the 
game of knowing is a chain of links without 
number. Practically, however, we do not 
bother ourselves in general to extend any 
particular chain of knowing beyond some 
link which can be further added to only 
26 



The Game of Knowing 27 

through repetitions of our own past chains 
of knowing. 

As an example of such a broken chain of 
knowing, let us ask the reader the question, 
1 ' How many days make a week ? " " Seven" 
is his "correct" answer, but he will observe 
that he does not think of attempting to 
elucidate in turn for himself the meaning of 
this word " seven." This however is not 
because he could, if he chose, do so in a 
theoretically finished manner. It simply re- 
sults from the fact that his game of mind is 
at least prepared at the moment to associate 
this word seven with any one of a dozen or 
more different, additional links from his 
potential vocabulary or system of symbolic 
equivalents. But a savage, or any one 
unacquainted with the English language, 
would never think of stopping a chain of 
knowing with the word " seven," whether 
spoken or printed. To him the word has 
no clearly defined potential linkages. It is 
simply not "familiar" ground. 

Now an analogy is not only valuable from 
the standpoint of likeness, but from the 
opposite point of view also of unlikeness. We 
have likened man to a living dictionary. 
Man's mental prerogative, however, consists 



28 The Game of Mind 

in being non-stereotyped. Let us therefore 
analyze the mental attribute of plasticity, as 
distinguished from the stereotyped system 
of symbolism of the dictionary. 

There is a saying that history repeats 
itself. This means that all history, past 
and to come, might be delineated upon a 
surface like a map, the march of events 
taking a zigzag and eventually reticulated 
route over the same. Now the widespread 
map of any man's mental life is, to a first 
approximation, any good unabridged diction- 
ary. Therein is exhibited, at one time and 
all the time, a vast stereotyped content. 
Mental life, for its part, is a narrow line, 
projecting itself forward over this motionless 
map in a strangely meandering fashion. 
Thus it happens, for example, that a ship 
is a permanently pictured feature of the one, 
and but a passing phantasmagoria of the 
other. Or again, that the word "seven" 
is indelibly printed a thousand times in the 
dictionary, but is erased from the life of the 
mind for days at a time. In short, any 
particular element of the mind is an adap- 
tation to a momentary occasion, whereas 
occasions do not exist for the dictionary 
at all, but its whole worded content 



The Game of Knowing 29 

lies spread out baldly over two thousand 
pages. 

The non-stereotyped nature of the human 
game of mind, then, depends upon choice, 
in a field where choice is eminently possible. 
We must hasten to add, however, that this 
''choice" is entirely mechanistic. From the 
day of his birth to the moment of death a 
man makes progress through life in a mecha- 
nistic fashion. The only alternative to the 
continuous mechanistic game of life is a 
mechanistic suicide or death. According 
to a man's mechanistic structure and con- 
dition, and his mechanistic reaction to 
environment, so is his mentality. By hered- 
ity, training and habit, certain men occupy 
themselves with the search after the essences 
of things. These are our philosophical 
thinkers. But even in their case there is no 
"choice" except in the sense of mechanistic 
resultant. Likewise in their mental work 
they can no more escape from the region of 
symbolism, as it finds its medium in bodily 
activity, than a bird can fly out of the earth's 
atmosphere into interplanetary space. We 
all see a ship, for example, as a mechanistic 
consummation only, and the same is true 
of each and every element of thought and 



30 The Game of Mind 

consciousness. In passing, we will simply 
remark that the difficulty, or present impos- 
sibility, which there may be in our confirming 
this by direct introspection, merely indicates 
a limitation on the part of the human game 
of mind which the mechanistic doctrine 
should be at no great labor to explain. 

Besides being non-stereotyped and linear, 
mental life differs from the system of the 
dictionary in that its types of symbols are 
more varied. The dictionary contains but 
two major types of symbols, printed words 
and pictures. Symbols of punctuation, etc., 
are distinctly minor. But mental life is so 
well supplied with major types of symbols 
that it can spare several of them altogether 
without irreparably handicapping itself. 
Thus a blind, deaf and mute person may 
achieve to a richness of mental life 
which puts to shame the mentality of 
a large proportion of normally endowed 
humans. 

Lastly, mental symbols are more mecha- 
nistically consequential. The symbolism of 
the dictionary is passive and self -conserved, 
that of the game of mind active and self- 
destructive. This tendency toward self- 
destruction is, however, checkmated by the 



The Game of Knowing 31 

reparative power of three meals and seven 
hours' sleep a day. 

Now while the existence of the above 
differences should be freely admitted, it is 
necessary that these characteristic qualities 
of activity, mobility and multiplicity should 
not deceive us regarding the essential nature 
of mental life. Mentality is a phantasma- 
goria which tricks the unsuspecting obser- 
ver into an exhausting and inconsequential 
chase forever after its changing phases. A 
dictionary, for its part, can be analyzed into 
printer's ink and paper by taking it as a 
whole into one's hands, and then subjecting 
it to analysis at any particular page, line or 
letter. But immediately, during introspec- 
tive analysis, we make the discovery that 
this or that simple element of mind is plainly a 
bodily process rather than something un- 
known and unknowable, the headlong flight 
onward of our mental life disconcerts us with 
its passage into bits of feeling, imagining, 
willing, remembering, knowing or philoso- 
phizing, and we loosen our grasp upon the 
mechanistic discovery , and perhaps even deny 
to ourselves altogether its claim to recogni- 
tion. Thus, instead of being at liberty to 
deal first with the simple elements of the 



32 The Game of Mind 

game of mind and only afterwards with the 
complex, the simple becomes overwhelmed 
by the complex with the proverbial rapidity 
of thought. 

This leads us to refer to the fact that in 
our introspective analysis we altogether fail 
to appreciate the truth that each mental 
element or shortest arc of the game of mind 
is tied down to, or as we should say, is con- 
stituted by, a bodily activity of some sort. 
In general we have in mind the fact that 
certain of the mental processes are at least 
accompanied by bodily processes, but we 
tacitly imagine that the mind proceeds on 
its own momentum, so to speak, between the 
intervals of bodily activity. In view of this 
situation, a useful and necessary psychologi- 
cal habit to acquire is that of asking our- 
selves, in season and out of season, the pointed 
question, "What at this instant is the form 
of bodily activity accompanying, i.e., con- 
stituting, the mental life of the moment ?" 
If consistently carried out, this program 
should gradually aid us to discover, behind 
the symbolism and make-believe of the gen- 
eral game of mind, that system of bodily 
activity which alone constitutes the reality 
of the game of knowing. 



The Game of Knowing 33 

While still on the subject of knowing we 
wish to direct attention to the fact that our 
present study of the game of mind is indeed 
a perfectly legitimate inquiry, considered 
from the purely mechanistic standpoint. 
No doubt there is a tendency for the critical 
mind to cavil at a philosophical doctrine 
which reduces all knowing to the basis of a 
system of symbolism, and at the same time 
undertakes itself to know that such in fact 
is the case. The paradox, however, turns 
out to be a paralogism of the critic himself. 
For certainly there is from this mechanistic 
standpoint nothing essentially paradoxical 
in knowing symbolically the truth of any 
matter. Dictionary -wise, to keep returning 
to an analogy which we believe the reader 
will find helpful if he will but bear with it, — 
dictionary -wise a man may discuss anything 
under the sun — as well as other or impossible 
things — provided only he has the use of the 
necessary symbolic equivalents. A dictionary 
does not cease being a plain affair of printer's 
ink and paper, even in those parts wherein it 
discusses the natures of printer's ink and 
paper, and that particular combination of the 
two which constitutes the dictionary itself. 
No less privileged certainly ismechanisticman. 



CHAPTER V 

THE GAME OF FEELING 

To classify feeling as a thing of game-rules 
and make-believe is sufficiently startling. 
Yet our present discussion unavoidably 
leads us to do so. 

Perhaps the least opportune time for a 
man to attempt to philosophize and intro- 
spectively to analyze the significance of his 
feelings is during the progress of a racking 
toothache. At any rate, he would in all 
probability at that time have little sympathy 
with a theory which reduced his trouble to 
the basis of a game. The one thing that 
really concerns him then is his own sense of 
injured feelings. That thought indeed he 
propounds to himself, in actual words, or 
else their equivalent, from instant to instant. 
Therein he proves himself a monomaniac. 
Evidently, therefore, the victim of a tooth- 
ache is in no condition of mind to make an 

34 



The Game of Feeling 35 

unbiased inquiry into his own particular 
system of consciousness. 

The reader, however, is not similarly 
incapacitated, and may be asked the question, 
11 To what extent does the mere reiteration, 
by the possessor of the toothache, of the 
complaint that he is indeed feeling pain, 
influence or constitute that pain?" In 
other words, "If the victim were so organized 
that he need not perforce tell himself each 
instant that he is being hurt, would the hurt 
exist as such at all?" We are convinced 
that it would not. A toothache, mentally 
considered, is not a feeling which exists, 
arrayed in all its ugliness, whether this 
ugliness be pictured and complained of by 
its victim or not. This truth indeed seems 
almost self-evident immediately it is brought 
to our attention. For the alternative situa- 
tion is the absurd one in which a double 
existence is given to the same ugliness, a 
lack in economy which organic nature, whose 
working rule is the survival of the fittest — 
hence the most efficient — naturally cannot 
tolerate. 

Moreover the presence of such a dual 
existence is absolutely uncorroborated by 
the findings of introspection. It is true that 



36 The Game of Mind 

our everyday, shorthand psychology con- 
ceives the ugliness of complaint as projected 
backwards into an ugliness complained of; 
but there is no more reason for supposing 
that this represents the true relation of 
things, than, in the analogous, visual case 
already referred to, that our personal vision 
is a bona fide activity at or to a distance. 

Accordingly the game-quality of the feel- 
ings stands revealed. A feeling is just what 
we tell ourselves it is. Apart from the 
assemblage of symbolic attributes by means 
of which we conceive it, no feeling has any 
mental existence whatsoever. Just as the 
ugliness of a toothache is wholly an ugliness 
of complaint, so the beauty of a landscape is, 
mentally, wholly the pleasure of our own 
rejoicing in it. The pain and pleasure we 
take in things is an activity, not a condition. 
We do not first feel the pain and the pleasure 
and then sorrow and rejoice. Instead we 
only sorrow and rejoice in a " correct 1 ' 
bodily way, pain and pleasure finding their 
whole content therein as discussional or 
symbolic constructs. 

The bearing of this theory of feeling upon 
the necessary nature of mind is apparent. 
On the basis of our shorthand psychology, 



The Game of Feeling 37 

mind is something which can be pained, 
whatever that may be supposed to imply. 
Upon our present theory mind is rather that 
which can refer to itself as being pained. It 
is a question on the one hand of actually 
possessing a quality or manner of being, and 
on the other hand of simply making a sym- 
bolic statement to the effect that such a 
manner of being is possessed; and this irre- 
spective of whether, as is the case with pain, 
the suggested manner of being, like a geo- 
metrical "round square," is a thoroughgoing 
impossibility of nature. The distinction is 
seen to be sufficiently real when it is con- 
sidered that even a dictionary is capable, in 
its own stereotyped, mechanistically incon- 
sequential way, of doing precisely what our 
own theory requires of the mind of man. It 
all resolves down, on the " mental" side, to 
the use of symbolic activities, in part ar- 
ticulate, and in part not articulate. On 
the bodily side these activities help to consti- 
tute a mechanistic life such as the human 
organism, in its actual environing world, is 
fitted to live. 

In the light of this simplifying theory, let 
us analyze in a general way what happens 
mentally and bodily during the progress of a 



38 The Game of Mind 

toothache. The sense-organ involved is the 
tooth, as in vision it is the eye. Mentally, 
then, a toothache is the mind's discussion of 
what is occurring in the tooth, just as vision is 
the unwitting discussion of what is occurring 
in the eyes. Now the mind discusses things, 
qualities and relations by means of symbolic 
bodily activities. Of these symbolic activi- 
ties, those constituting articulate speech 
occupy a large and important place. The 
activities of articulate speech, however, do 
no more than take their place along with the 
activities of many other bodily parts, and 
by no means monopolize mental life to them- 
selves. Now the body's symbolic discussion 
of a bad tooth is primarily not an articulate 
one at all, either outspoken or suppressed. 
The words frequently come too, but only by 
way of additional links to the chain of feeling 
which the bad tooth establishes over and over 
again in the victim's being. In other words, 
the bodily activity which symbolizes the 
ugliness of the bad tooth is a "familiar" one 
to the victim, and like the student's word 
"bee-glue," requires in practice no further 
elucidation. As it happens, however, this 
primary (but still more or less general) bodily 
activity, reestablished in a man's organism 



The Game of Feeling 39 

from moment to moment like water-waves at 
a point of continued disturbance, is of so 
violent a nature that such primary stage 
itself is commonly overreached, and the 
complaint becomes an articulate one as well. 
What then is the form of bodily activity 
which constitutes the victim's primary com- 
plaint? To discover the answer to this 
question by the direct method requires an 
effective introspective analysis at such time 
as we are experiencing the "pain" itself. 
Unfortunately for the success of this sug- 
gested analysis, our shorthand psychology 
then steps in, as we have seen, and forcibly 
asserts its own pragmatic, evolutional prin- 
ciples. For in real life it is beside the point 
for a man to know the manner of his complaint 
in toothache, just as it is useless for him to 
know of the retinal activity of his eyes as 
such in his everyday game of seeing. The 
ugliness of the diseased tooth in the one case, 
and the world of things in the other, are 
the practically important factors. Hence it 
happens that the games of seeing and of 
feeling are full of make-believe, and our 
shorthand psychology thereof full of theo- 
retical absurdities. To avoid all this absurd- 
ity and make-believe it is doubtless necessary 



40 The Game of Mind 

to investigate the feelings largely in a non- 
introspective manner, i.e., physiologically. 
At present, however, we are not in a position 
to make even this indirect analysis with 
mechanistic effectiveness or genuineness. To 
the physiology of the future we must look 
for aid in the detailed analysis of the charac- 
teristic activity-content of our feelings. 

In the meantime, we are at liberty to 
attain to a full recognition of the truth that 
the feelings are indeed not what they com- 
monly pass themselves off as being. Cer- 
tainly a man, according to his best direct 
judgment, is warranted in conceiving that 
the pain of a crushed finger lies in the finger 
itself. Nevertheless, the finger, the hand, 
and the whole arm may be amputated with- 
out, possibly, destroying the pain-sensation, 
or shifting its apparent localization to some 
other bodily part. In the face of such a fact 
as this we are simply driven to the theory 
that a feeling consciously exists here or there 
in the body in a symbolic manner only. 
Now certainly there is no other attribute of 
feeling, as analyzed by our everyday, short- 
hand psychology, which can pretend to be 
so weighty, so real, or so fundamental as to 
overstep the powers of a like symbolism. 



The Game of Feeling 41 

Whence we find ourselves bound to the con- 
clusion that we get out of our feelings pre- 
cisely what, in a symbolic way, we put into 
them, and nothing more. 

To state our conclusion in psychological 
terms, we may say that our fancied feeling- 
sensations have turned out instead to be 
feeling-perceptions. The organism of man 
is too thoroughly linked and highly energized 
to hold itself to surface-conditions or effects. 
The simplest elements of mental life are 
reactions to or discussions of surface- or 
other conditions. Take for example that 
optical illusion-picture which consists in a 
bare outline of a flight of steps. One instant 
we perceive it as a flight of steps seen from 
above, and the next instant as the same steps 
seen from underneath. The transition from 
the former interpretation to the latter occurs 
with the rapidity of thought and without 
effort on our part : and not only involuntarily, 
but even in spite of voluntary effort to the 
contrary. Therein we have a splendid ex- 
ample of involuntary, non-articulate inter- 
pretation, which our shorthand psychology 
often persists in refusing to recognize as such. 
This "common-sense" psychology holds te- 
naciously to the notion that things are what 



42 The Game of Mind 

they seem, — that the seeming of things is 
a true and immediate imaging of the things 
themselves. So far as the example just 
cited goes, however, it is seen that this sort 
of psychological doctrine is palpably false. 
Without attempting to show at this point 
that it is also false in other applications, we 
wish simply to urge attention to the circum- 
stance that it is just such an involuntary, 
wordless form of interpretation or discussion 
as the above which constitutes the ugliness 
of pain and the comeliness of pleasure. By 
all means let the reader make an experimental 
study of the subject of optical illusions in 
general, and ask himself at frequent intervals 
whether his game of perception as regards 
them is not truly illuminating in connection 
with his whole game of mind. As just indi- 
cated, man is a well-energized mechanism 
which responds readily and curiously to the 
stimulation of an optical illusion-picture on 
the one hand, and a diseased tooth on the 
other. In both cases the response is, without 
theoretical warrant, projected by shorthand 
psychology out of the activity-class in which 
it actually belongs, into an entity-class. 
Thus the activity of seeing becomes an 
extra-bodily vision of an illusory flight of 



The Game of Feeling 43 

steps; and the activity of feeling becomes, 
similarly absurdly, the pain of the tooth as 
such. But stripped of the perspective of 
make-believe, sight and feeling both become 
pure mechanistic activities. The map and 
mystery of the game of mind lie revealed 
to a surprising extent in the strange phantas- 
magoria of the optical illusion-picture of 
double interpretation. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE GAME OF REMEMBERING 

Without the faculty of remembering, 
mind as we know it would be impossible. 
In a general way we may say that mental 
life and the stream of things rememberable 
are identical. Every mental element leaves 
a trace of itself behind it, at least for a 
moment, by means of which it is, or may be, 
recalled. This being the case, it is especially 
necessary to understand precisely what this 
faculty of remembering signifies and involves. 

We have all heard it related how a drown- 
ing man sometimes will, during the short 
period of his great danger, pass large portions 
of his life in mental review, and live over in 
memory a surprising number of its principal 
events. Now, according to the mechanistic 
doctrine, this sort of thing represents a 
reactionary quickening of the activities of 
the body at a time when its surroundings have 
all at once become abnormal and threatening. 

44 



The Game of Remembering 45 

Normal life may be likened to a ball toss- 
ing gracefully at the tip of a fountain-jet. 
Strike the ball lightly and it regains its 
equilibrium again at some slight cost of time 
and oscillatory movement. Strike it harder 
and its movement becomes heavy and con- 
vulsive, and possibly results in a total loss 
of the ball's poised position. In a similar 
manner the game of mind sometimes prefaces 
its own end by a supranormal manifestation 
of its characteristic activities. 

We have here referred to the game of mind 
as if it were, like a tossing ball, wholly a 
thing of the mechanistic present. What 
then has the game of remembering to do with 
the past? The answer is that symbolically 
it does bring the past events into being again. 
Let us analyze the meaning of this. 

"Common-sense" psychology tells us that 
past events pass in review in our conscious- 
ness upon a plane which is at least somewhat 
tilted from the plane of the mechanistic pres- 
ent. The facts of physiological psychology, 
however, sufficiently controvert this notion. 
The brain is now known to be the special 
organ of retention, and remembrance is pri- 
marily a matter of the reconstitution of past 
events in symbolic terms. Along with this 



46 The Game of Mind 

process of reconstitution or reconstruction 
there is, in the game of conscious remember- 
ing, a more or less definite projection of the 
reconstructed matter back into the past. This 
again is effected in a purely symbolic way, in 
the same manner as our visual pictures are 
projected to a distance in front of us, or as 
our complaint of a toothache is projected 
into the diseased tooth. The symbolism for 
remoteness in time is in part articulate, and 
in part of other forms than words. As 
already pointed out, there is no clear line of 
mechanistic demarcation between the bodily 
activities constituting speech, outspoken and 
suppressed, and the great variety of other 
forms of bodily activity which are involved 
in mental life. So long as a mental element 
can readily be linked with other mental 
elements, that is to say, provided the mental 
element be " familiar" ground to the individ- 
ual, it matters not whether it be the activity 
of the vocal organs or of some other part of 
the total bodily mechanism. 

This quality which each familiar mental 
element possesses of being linked at each 
moment, latently if not actively, with other 
elements is known in psychology as the asso- 
ciation of ideas, or more comprehensively, 



The Game of Remembering 47 

mental association. Now remembering is 
evidently a matter of such mental association. 
It is a repetition, more or less complete, of a 
certain previously existing system of asso- 
ciations, together with an explanatory mental 
attitude which declares, in a symbolic manner, 
that this system of associations is an entity 
from out the past. A discussion of the 
mechanism of mental association is therefore 
here needed. 

Mental association depends, without the 
least doubt, upon the structure of the body, 
and more especially upon the general sys- 
tem of nerve-fibers and nerve-centers. It is 
generally taken for granted in physiological 
psychology that the brain is the seat of 
physiological and therefore psychological 
association. Nevertheless, on the basis that 
mental association is purely a sequence of 
bodily activities, it is necessary to trace out 
the succession of, and causal connection 
between, such bodily processes as are known 
to be involved in the general game of mind. 

Now each portion of the cerebro-spinal 
nervous system, probably, together with 
each organ or bodily part controlled by it 
in a motor way, or contrariwise affecting it 
in a sensory way, is at one time or another 



48 The Game of Mind 

the seat of activities which belong to the 
game of mind. Psychology sometimes tells 
us very wrongly, and inconsistently, that 
a man's mind is not in the least located in 
his hands, his arms, his legs or his feet. On 
the contrary, amputations of the bodily 
parts are in general equally amputations of 
the mental parts as well. For the entity 
or system mind is either nothing at all, or 
it is the sum total from moment to mo- 
ment of the elements of mental life, which 
are bodily activities. Now take away from a 
man a hand, a foot, his tongue, his eyes, his 
ear-drums, his semicircular canals, and little 
by little the various seats of his bodily 
activities are lost to him, and this being, who 
before was a complete man, is no longer such 
either in body or in mind. It is, to be sure, 
true that a certain pain-sensation of the hand, 
for example, may persist without apparent 
marked change even after the amputation 
of the hand itself. It must be remembered, 
however, that such sensation is only an 
incident in or connected with the psychologi- 
cal life of the normal hand. The perceptions 
of touch, muscular activity, temperature, 
pressure, etc., which normally belong to 
or concern the life of the hand, are unques- 



The Game of Remembering 49 

tionably as a system destroyed forever upon 
its amputation. Thus, assuming that the 
body and mind — "body and mind" being 
a convenient expression by which to denote 
the body as active in its " psychologically" 
mechanistic way — assuming that body and 
mind both " survive" an amputation or 
organic loss of any kind, then at any rate 
the survival is not a complete or unqualified 
one. 

Fundamentally, therefore, a mental activ- 
ity belongs as much to a hand, an arm, the 
vocal cords, or some other part of the body 
as to the brain. Just as in a telephone- 
system the central exchange is a necessary 
but not a sole factor in the normal talking 
circuit, so in general it must be conceded 
that the brain is not an all-sufficient, though 
it is a necessary, bodily organ in the carrying- 
on of the game of mind. A brain, isolated 
from the rest of the body, and yet continuing 
the game of mind by itself, is a monstrous 
conception. It takes, on the contrary, a 
representative amount of the bodily structure 
and substance — bone, blood, muscle, flesh, 
viscera, sense-organs — to make the game of 
mind even a possibility. And besides all 
this required structure and substance a 



50 The Game of Mind 

characteristic energistic tone, shared by the 
whole, is essential. A human body, newly 
dead, may lack but the breath of energy 
appropriate to its parts to make it a truly 
conscious being again. 

Thus the game of mind is a concrete 
system of activities which stands solely upon 
the mechanistically consequential nature of 
its own varied content. Were a singer's 
bodily activities no other than those recorded 
by a phonograph, he would be as little a 
conscious being as is the reproducing phono- 
graph itself. By the same certainty a pho- 
nograph lacks, in being a man, only in those 
bodily activities (and so bodily structure) 
which it, as a phonograph and not a human 
organism, fails to possess. But they are 
legion. 

This much having been discussed, we are 
now in a position to recognize the truth that 
mental association is a thing of the body as a 
whole, not of the brain individually. While 
it is true that the motor response to a sensory 
impulse depends on the structure of the brain, 
it is also true that chains of bodily processes 
do not in general end immediately a sensory 
or centripetal activity has been thus handed 
on as an appropriate motor or centrifugal 



The Game of Remembering 51 

activity. On the contrary, the centrifugal 
activity, in spending itself in one or another 
extracerebral part of the body, does not fail 
to affect in turn the sensory nerve-beginnings 
in that particular bodily part. Whereupon 
in general a new centripetal activity centers 
toward the brain, and is handed on in turn 
as a second centrifugal activity. Hence the 
tendency, which mental association exhibits, 
of maintaining itself indefinitely, a tendency 
which is held to only partially in practice 
on account of numberless sensory distractions, 
quick fatigue of bodily parts, etc. 

But after all the brain is involved especially 
intimately as a mechanistic factor in mental 
association. For the brain is par excellence 
that part of the body which is plastic 
to the molding influence of the game of 
mind. While the other parts of the bodily 
structure participate in the activities of the 
game only as tools or structures to be used as 
such, the mass of the brain is ever ready to 
put some part or component of itself at the 
service of the game of mind to be used merely 
as raw material. Now it is altogether prob- 
able that the structure taken on by this raw 
material, through the agency of mental life, 
is microscopic and suited to no other purpose 



52 The Game of Mind 

than that of nervous intercommunication 
and activity. In other words, the raw 
material is molded into new or modified 
nerve-pathways through the brain. Taken 
as a whole, the brain may be considered as 
purely a switchboard by means of which 
afferent nerves stand or are put into commu- 
nication with efferent nerves. The system of 
the switchboard is vastly compound and 
intricate, and involves, besides a marvelous 
network of nerve-fibers, a system of energy- 
supply which is equally marvelous. But 
with all this wonderful complexity, it must 
be considered in its function as equivalent 
simply to the equality signs of algebraic 
equations. The first term of a mental 
equation is the united activity of one or 
another sense-organ, associated nerve-begin- 
nings and sensory nerve-fibers; the second 
term is the resulting activity of motor nerves 
and muscular and other parts. Between 
these two terms of the mental equation an 
associating activity, passing along some 
ramifying pathway of the brain, stands as 
the mental operation of equality. 

But as already seen, the equality signs in 
the brain are always to a certain extent under- 
going a new creation — a variation upon 



The Game of Remembering 53 

themselves. This process, which belongs to 
the mechanism of the association of ideas, is, 
through the greater or less persistence of 
these new creations in the brain's pathways, 
a favoring condition towards the reconstitu- 
tion of past associations, i. e., of remembering. 
In this reconstitution the brain's office is to 
accomplish the work of cerebral association or 
linkage, the elements thus undergoing associa- 
tion being supplied by the remainder of the 
body. For, as already insisted upon, a 
mentally active human being is, in the game 
of remembering as well as in all the other 
games of mind, anything but a mere disem- 
bodied brain. Whence the game of remem- 
bering involves a more or less consistent 
duplication of former extracerebral activities 
of the body, together with revived intra- 
cerebral activities having the office of com- 
pleting their association or linkage into 
extended chains. This consummation of ac- 
tivities depends in turn equally upon the per- 
manence of general extracerebral structure, 
and a permanence of particular intracerebral 
structure as specially created in the past. 

To sum up, the brain is indispensably 
involved always in the game of remembering. 
By turns also the other consequential parts 



54 The Game of Mind 

of the body enter therein as equally essen- 
tial seats of its activity. If anything, the 
latter parts stand even first in the mecha- 
nistic import of their processes. This high 
importance of extracerebral activities in 
mentality is a characteristic belonging equally 
to all phases of the general game of mind. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE GAME OF CONSCIOUSNESS 

Making adaptation of a well-known adage 
we obtain the improvised psychological prov- 
erb, "Conscious is that conscious does." 
Here, compressed into five words, we have 
the correct basis, as we believe, for the solu- 
tion of the psychological mystery of con- 
sciousness. Our discussion of the significance 
and substance of consciousness therefore 
takes the form of an elaboration of this very 
brief thesis. 

In our everyday, shorthand psychology, 
in which seeing and remembering are pro- 
jected out of their rightful category as pure 
bodily activities, and made to take on 
fancied attributes of remoteness in space 
and time respectively, the bodily activity 
of consciousness looms up as the vastest of 
all enigmas. Not content with the obvious 
interpretation of consciousness as a bodily 
behavior in which the human mechanism 
55 



56 The Game of Mind 

symbolically discusses or introspects itself 
— much as a dictionary, in its own modest 
way, does with regard to its own contents 
and substance — everyday psychology insists 
that man not only acts in an introspective 
or conscious manner, but is conscious. 

In thus making a distinction between 
consciousness as a type of behavior and 
consciousness as a manner of being, short- 
hand psychology has recourse to inaccuracy 
and haze of conception. For what it means 
to a being to be conscious, otherwise than 
in the fact of a succession of self -analytic 
mechanistic activities, shorthand psychology 
is wholly unprepared to tell. Fundamentally 
this distinction (without a difference) serves 
only as a peg upon which to hang an un- 
mechanistic psychology high and dry above 
the matter-of-fact world of scientific experi- 
ment and useful theory. 

Now in our study of the game of mind we 
all too naturally accord credit to man for 
circumstances which reflect back rather to 
the power and effectiveness of organic evolu- 
tion. Thus in place of the meaningless 
assertion that man acts consciously because 
he is a conscious being, the evolutional out- 
look forces us to the statement that man be- 



The Game of Consciousness 57 

haves consciously because creative evolution 
has, through the millenniums, been molding 
organic nature into more and more curious 
and effective forms. Evolutionally we are 
all clay in the hands of the potter. Do we 
have bones and muscles? Then it is because 
organic evolution, not ourselves, has arranged 
it so. Do we see a world of images appar- 
ently outside ourselves and at a distance? 
Do we tell ourselves we are hurt when a 
tooth decays? Do we indulge in activities 
of the body which have organic imports, one 
activity being the complement, the discussion, 
the interpretation, the symbolism, of another? 
Then it is because of our evolutional struc- 
ture. If we have imagination, forethought, 
ambition, will, a certain freedom of mind, 
it is not true that we have endowed ourselves 
with these wonderful forms of activity. 
Life is a mechanistic trajectory, whose general 
course the evolutional past has already worked 
out to an exceeding nicety. In this trajec- 
tory the activity of consciousness, and the 
apparent freedom of activity which in our 
game of mind we know as the freedom of the 
will, take their places with as little ceremony 
or mystery as do the perturbations in the 
orbital course of a solar planet. Historically 



58 The Game of Mind 

the whole grand trajectory of life exists down 
the ages as the resultant of a natural mecha- 
nistic selection of equally natural mechanis- 
tic variety. And this resultant stands to 
present-day man as a thing given. 

The factors of organic evolution thus 
relieving us of the necessity of explaining 
man's consciousness as a thing for which 
man himself is responsible, our psychological 
burden of analysis becomes vastly lightened. 
The simplification is analogous in degree to 
that we discovered in the psychology of the 
feelings when we acknowledged the fact that 
pain is a form of complaint only. To assure 
ourselves of the same, as well as to give the 
thesis, "Conscious is that conscious does,'* 
a satisfying measure of meaning, we will now 
proceed to consider what our opponents 
would be pleased to call mechanistic man 
sans consciousness. 

A mechanism worthy to be called mecha- 
nistic man must of necessity be a very 
extraordinary machine. Automatons made 
by human ingenuity are too little entitled 
to such appellative distinction to concern us 
in the least here. Even a normal man, in 
his sleeping hours, is for our present discus- 
sion not a good and sufficient starting-point. 



The Game of Consciousness 59 

On the other hand, a somnambulist will 
serve the purpose very well. Suppose, ac- 
cordingly, a somnambulist-subject of ours 
to undertake a ramble through a daylighted 
woods. Then our first duty is to recognize 
the fact that this mechanistic subject has 
powers of associative and appropriate bodily 
activity which are very great indeed. Under 
the guidance of his several senses, he can 
walk and even run through the woods in a 
perfectly normal and even phenomenal man- 
ner. Upon his retinas fall in a normal 
manner the images of the objects about him. 
In his ears resound the noises of the woods 
and the noise of his own footfalls. Upon 
his spread-out skin play the effects of air 
currents cooling it, of branches and under- 
brush striking against it, of clothing restrain- 
ing and protecting it. In his body the 
particular energistic tone prevails which the 
larger activities of the body always induce. 
And all this activity in the sensorial parts is 
transformed and amplified through the agency 
of the central nervous system into appropriate 
and nicely measured and coordinated motor 
activities. Here certainly is an automaton 
which puts to shame any combination of the 
camera obscura, the recording and reproduc- 



60 The Game of Mind 

ing phonograph, the dancing toy-figure, or 
what not, which man is ever likely to be able 
to invent. 

And yet even this somnambulist-subject 
does not, as we may suppose, even touch 
upon the domain of conscious activity. For 
conscious activity is, to be sure, neither plain 
walking, nor running, nor speaking, even as 
carried on under the exceptional guidance of 
the five senses. It is only vhen performed 
with accompanying self-analytic processes 
that these activities enter as elements into a 
more inclusive game of mind. As a matter 
of fact, then, our somnambulistic subject, 
though vastly clever in a limited mechanistic 
way, nevertheless falls short of the especial 
mechanistic world of consciousness. We are 
now, however, ready to permit his awaking 
to normal fullness of bodily activity, and 
to give ourselves over, the while and after- 
wards, to a realization of the truth that 
this growth in bodily life is really, for one 
thing, a development to a normal fullness 
of self-analytic bodily activity — which is 
consciousness. 

Now a man does not awake out of the 
somnambulant state — startled by a noisy 
partridge, as we will suppose — without the 



The Game of Consciousness 61 

intrusion, and help, of much new mechanistic 
activity. For besides the operations of 
walking, seeing and hearing, there is a vast 
deal of other physiological activity possible 
to awakened man. This latter includes a 
surprising range of bodily self -analysis. 

Bodily self -analysis depends upon the 
ability which the general organism possesses 
of putting different parts of itself into the 
situation of mutually influencing each other. 
A raindrop, for its part, hitches slantingly 
down the window-pane of a rapidly moving 
railroad-coach, and possesses no mechanism 
in itself whereby it can at all discuss the 
matter. But self-analysis in man is a 
mechanistic consummation, and admits of 
endless variety as to the shifting combina- 
tion of the mutually influencing parts. In 
this part-with-part activity the eyes, or their 
retinal images, naturally play a leading r61e. 
As an example of this mechanistically or 
organically consequential type of activity 
we may set down the mutual influencing of 
hands and retinas which occurs in the per- 
formance of any careful manual task. This 
single example of bodily activity, however, 
is only a start toward self -analysis, whose 
particular formidableness, as a thing to be 



62 The Game of Mind 

analyzed, lies in its phantasmagoric or stream- 
ing quality. For it is necessary to admit 
once again that a somnambulist is capable 
of performing one or another careful manual 
task under the direction of visual images. 
But never yet and never will a somnambulist, 
in that capacity, carry self -analysis, consid- 
ered from the bodily standpoint alone, to 
the mechanistic bounds which the feeblest 
minded, but actually conscious, man does 
habitually. Indeed the mere somnambulist, 
even in his carefully performed operations, 
fails to realize a whole peculiar world of 
bodily operations which belongs as a possi- 
bility to physiological man. Even a scant 
introspection of ourselves in the conscious 
performance of a task will reveal a range or 
type of bodily activity which is quite foreign 
to the manner of bodily being of the somnam- 
bulist. It is an activity of discussion, and 
its mechanistic characteristics are such that, 
of all the mechanisms we know of, of what- 
ever complexity, that of man is the only one 
which can support it to any considerable 
extent. 

So much by way of introducing ourselves 
to the bodily possibilities of our now aroused 
somnambulist-subject. 



The Game of Consciousness 63 

Our mechanistic subject, then, does not 
long remain merely startled. In a few 
moments' time he has, as we say, collected 
himself. This means that for a short interval 
his bodily parts, relative to each other and 
to their immediate environment, are very 
busy. For adequate mechanistic recovery 
from the somnambulant state, and a shock, 
implies unavoidably a general mechanistic 
discussion of the whole situation. In the 
concrete world of the human body, some- 
thing does not proceed from nothing. 

At this point it is necessary to state at 
once that this mechanistic discussion of our 
awakening subject is not primarily an articu- 
late one. For language, as we have already 
seen, is after all only a longhand and sup- 
plementary form of symbolic bodily activity. 
It enlarges without creating the self-analytic 
powers. The actual scheme of the body's 
discussion of a situation or a thing (e.g., of 
our former optical illusion-picture) is one of 
suppressed or little apparent activities of the 
principal parts of the body, i.e., the arms, 
legs, eyes, viscera. This inceptive bodily 
activity has been revealed by the experimen- 
tal use of the planchette, and upon it is based 
the art of muscle-reading. Discussion in 



64 The Game of Mind 

terms of articulate (whether outspoken or 
suppressed) words is accordingly not to be 
largely looked for in the startled awakening 
of our present subject. 

Mostly by means of wordless bodily dis- 
cussion, then, our mechanistic subject ana- 
lyzes, to his own satisfaction, the situation 
he is in. Being an experienced somnam- 
bulist, as we may suppose, his bodily organism 
has already acquired the power of quick 
self -analysis in cases of this kind. He there- 
fore tells himself successively that he is 
alarmed; alarmed by a noise; alarmed out of 
sleep; a walking sleep; in the woods; alarmed 
by a sudden din in front of him; a whirring 
which is still sounding ; faintly ; at a distance ; 
to his left — alarmed foolishly and walking 
to no purpose in his sleep. All this he actually 
tells himself by a well-directed application 
of his self -analytic and general observational 
powers. Each item is a mechanistic consum- 
mation. Omitted as such the item simply 
becomes non-existent. Were our subject 
not so organized and equipped as naturally 
to evolve each particular item in its turn, his 
self -recovery in this hypothetical case of ours 
would be so far incomplete. To appropriate 
the fact, for example, that the whirring sound 



The Game of Consciousness 65 

still comes from the left and from a distance, 
these two items of information have actually 
to be given mechanistic pronouncement by 
the subject. In all this our mechanistic 
subject is, as it were, playing a game of 
solitaire, in which the natural inertia of things 
is overcome only by virtue of his own sus- 
tained activities. To awaken one's self, 
thus signifies the carrying out in the concrete 
of a particular mechanistic program. 

Depending upon his personal interests, 
the mechanistic life of our awakened subject 
now takes one or another dominant tone. 
Supposing, however, his interest to be largely 
philosophic, he will naturally, upon his 
homeward walk, be in a mood to discuss with 
himself the significance of his recent mecha- 
nistic awakening. Soon he also makes the 
observation that each item of his recovery 
was an activity on his own part, a solitaire- 
wise play which contained precisely what he 
himself put into it and nothing more. He 
realizes for the first time that the world of 
his self-analysis and general observation is, 
as such, wholly the world of his own making, 
the world of his own organic activities. He 
also recognizes that this truth is independent 
of the degree of the accord which prevails 



66 The Game of Mind 

between his own world of artifact and the 
larger and environing world of things. And 
having once fairly mastered this truth, he 
becomes, from that moment on, precisely the 
thing which we suppose ourself to be — a 
pure mechanism, avowedly undertaking a 
mechanistic self-examination. 

Our subject, in his new rdle of mechanistic 
psychologist, now has complete use of the 
words, word-combinations and other bodily 
activities which are possible to philosophic 
man. For he is now a wide-awake physio- 
logical man and has the same use of his 
mechanistic eyes, ears, throat, etc., that 
anybody can have. Accordingly he creates 
unto himself a full and effective world of 
self -analysis and general observation. Where- 
upon our subject sees that he differs in no 
assignable detail from a fully conscious man. 
He therefore takes occasion to tell himself 
that he is one. 

To follow the ideas of our fully " conscious" 
subject still a little way, we may fancy him 
smiling at the naivete of a psychological 
doctrine which conceives the mind of man 
as sitting at its ease in its bodily temple and 
having at will mystic conception and knowl- 
edge of the things of the world in and 



The Game of Consciousness 67 

of themselves. An extramechanistic mind 
(whatever that may mean) might verily 
find a mission and a usefulness upon that 
basis. But what can be its mission when a 
man has to create to himself — as his organic 
structure, energies and energistic connection 
with environment enable him to do — his 
whole world of things, qualities and relations ? 
What can be its usefulness when conception 
and knowing, equally with walking and talk- 
ing, are activity-constructs of the body 
itself? Plainly in this actual case, retinal 
images, movements of the eye-muscles, tym- 
panic vibrations, activities of the tongue, 
lips and vocal cords, and other bodily pro- 
cesses, often impossible to define, and too 
numerous and multiform even to catalogue, 
alone have their practical place and signifi- 
cance. They alone are the mind's realities. 
Following this line of argument a step 
higher, our subject tries to give substance to 
the shadowy, evasive conjecture which says 
that consciousness is supramechanistic. And 
this he finds in a persistent incapacity of 
introspective or self-analytic psychology to 
see the mechanistic reality which lies in each 
slightest move of the game of mind, — a bodily 
activity whose necessary existence is nowa- 



68 The Game of Mind 

days freely admitted by competent physio- 
logical psychologists. As already described, 
shorthand psychology does read between 
the larger mechanistic lines of the game of 
mind, as indeed it should. But instead of 
reading still in mechanistic terms, it trenches 
upon the fanciful and meaningless. For the 
mechanistic conception alone is meaningful. 
And besides being of this world concrete, it 
is good and sufficient. It is a principle of 
universal applicability, not open to impeach- 
ment by any man possessing a brain and a 
body. 

Having now gradually gotten away from the 
original situation in which our mechanistic 
subject served a useful purpose, we will here- 
with continue our discussion without him. 
First, however, we wish to remark that he has 
given us the opportunity of seeing a genuine 
mechanistic man, not a mechanistic low- 
ideal. An organism which, in a walk through 
the woods, carries on a running discussion of 
things present, past and to come is not the 
sort of transparently simple machine which 
one evokes when advancing the proposition 
that a mechanism may not think. Neither, 
on the other hand, is that large world of illu- 
sion and make-believe, permeating in turn 



The Game of Consciousness 69 

each phase of our own minds, taken suffi- 
ciently into account by our doctrine's oppo- 
nents. The mechanistic doctrine is equally 
concerned in discovering the deeper possibili- 
ties of activity in evolutional mechanisms, 
and in bringing about the disillusionment of 
our everyday psychology. 

Now as conscious activity depends above 
all things upon the truth of symbolism, and 
as we have constantly had reference to the 
symbolic quality as belonging to the system 
of bodily activities constituting the game of 
mind, we are clearly in need of an elucidation 
of the fact of symbolism. In any case the 
mechanistic fact of symbolism is a matter of 
relations. To a fire destroying a printing- 
house, there is no symbolism in a whole 
stack of unabridged dictionaries. But be- 
tween man and the dictionary, man and man, 
man and himself, or man and dog, the case 
is different. Here a bodily activity (or 
printed character) reaches beyond itself and 
finds its reawakening in another organism, or 
a different part of the same organism. This 
system of part-with-part and organism-with- 
organism reechoing stands as an achieve- 
ment of evolution, and as such serves its 
users as a means to survival. Now bodily 



70 The Game of Mind 

activities of the type of retinal images, 
tympanic vibrations, vocal processes, etc., 
would have no survival- value for man did 
they not stand as a reliable intermediary 
between the realities of the environing world 
and the bare vegetal processes of man. Reli- 
ability in this case implies the existence of 
an established system of one-to-one corre- 
spondence between the things, qualities and 
relations of the outside world and these 
intermediating bodily activities. This cor- 
respondence, thus integrated into a system, 
may properly be termed the symbolism of 
the organic processes of man. 

Now, by extension of this principle of 
correspondence to the world of the self- 
analytic bodily processes, our account of the 
symbolism of the bodily processes becomes 
complete, and the symbolism characteristic 
to consciousness and self -consciousness be- 
comes recognizable as a mechanistic fact. 
As thus explained, symbolism depends upon 
the mechanistic structure of the non-vegetal 
regions and elements of the body, and is 
thus primarily a gift to us from the evolu- 
tional past. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE GAME OF MIND 

In this concluding chapter we wish first to 
return for a moment to the ever-fascinating 
subject of the inverted retinal images. 
Afterwards we will give an answer to some 
adverse criticism. Lastly we will introduce 
a summarizing paragraph by way of stereo- 
scopic composite to our unavoidably serial 
discussion. 

In discrediting shorthand psychology in 
an early chapter, we referred to the inverted 
and doubled condition of our retinal images. 
We then saw that introspection is powerless 
to reconcile that fact with the singleness and 
uprightness of objects as we actually see them. 
Our mechanistic account of this surprising 
situation was also hinted at, but may now be 
concluded with better understanding. 

Considered mechanistically or physiologi- 
cally, the two eyes act through the brain 
upon the general body in a consistent and 
71 



72 The Game of Mind 

integral manner. The same might still be 
true had we, like some insects, ten thousand 
facets or virtually separate eyes. Now in 
this constructive unity of extraretinal bodily 
activity, as associated in visual perception, 
lies the necessary and sufficient condition 
for the symbolic pronouncement of visual 
singleness, which our shorthand psychology 
is ready to accept as the attribute of visual 
singleness itself. For, in conformity with 
our whole mechanistic scheme, we may say 
that our consciousness of the attribute of 
singleness of objects, regarding which our 
eyes inform us, is of the nature of an affirma- 
tion or pronouncement which we give our- 
selves the trouble of introducing in our 
general game of seeing. In other words, at 
such time as we are in the mechanistic act 
of ascribing singleness to objects, we become 
"conscious," as we say, that objects do ap- 
pear single to us, for this mechanistic act of 
ascription and the consciousness in question 
are one. Without just such bodily discus- 
sion of the matter as this, our visual percep- 
tions could be likened, without falsification, 
to the functioning of a mere stereoscopic 
camera. 

To account for our perception of objects 



The Game of Mind 73 

as upright, it is seen at once that the same 
point of view is applicable. Again the 
mechanistic affirmation of the up-and-down 
relation of visually perceived objects is left 
to other portions of the body than the two 
retinas. Fundamentally, both these attri- 
butes of singleness and uprightness, as our 
visual perceptions contain them, are prag- 
matic activities of discussion consequent 
upon the particular structure of the body. 
Thanks to the achievements of organic 
evolution, the structure and energies of the 
human body are such as habitually to enable 
us to carry on the game of visual discussion 
in the notably successful manner we know so 
well. 

Now, not even a moderately rash opponent, 
we presume, is ready to deny flatly a thesis 
which we have been to the trouble of develop- 
ing throughout the previous pages; viz., 
that a system of illusion and make-believe 
permeates our everyday psychology and 
colors it through and through with the delu- 
sive mirage of the unreal. Moreover we 
believe such an opponent must find it 
impossible to satisfy himself as to the neces- 
sary limits — short of the limits set down by 



74 The Game of Mind 

the mechanistic doctrine itself — of this phe- 
nomenon of psychological delusion. Con- 
sequently he is inclined naturally to the 
alternative of declaring that illusion and 
make-believe, as entertained by our minds, 
are themselves of necessity extrabodily phe- 
nomena. However, after our mechanistic 
discussion of such particular psychological 
concepts as thought, feeling and conscious- 
ness, it is not to be anticipated that illusion 
and make-believe can prove stubborn phe- 
nomena in the hands of mechanistic analysis. 
Illusion and unwitting make-believe, in- 
deed, are not essential factors at all of the 
game of conscious mind, but rather unfor- 
tunate elements which limit and corrupt it. 
In the evolutional world in which survival 
of the fit is no more than a selective survival 
of the actual, perfection in fitness is hardly 
to be looked for. Expressed on the mental 
side, this means that man's bodily activities, 
as they constitute the game of mind, sym- 
bolize with more or less imperfectness the 
things, qualities and relations of the body 
and its environing world. A perfect con- 
sciousness, on the contrary, would contain 
neither illusion nor unwitting make-believe. 
Its game of mind would be without need of 



The Game of Mind 75 

disillusionment, not because of its being other 
than a game, but because of its containing 
within itself a complete world-analysis. Its 
own true nature, and the natures of other 
things, would lie open to its consistent 
symbolic system of knowing. 

Viewed in this light, illusion and make- 
believe take their places as qualities of semi- 
inconsistency and fraud now belonging to 
the symbolism of our psychological system of 
bodily activities. A more consistent use of 
symbolism must attend the mind's gradual 
disillusionment. 

There is (to pass to a second criticism) a 
commonly accredited hypothesis to the effect 
that the mechanistic doctrine implicates its 
advocate into the position of regarding the 
perceptions, thoughts and emotions of one's 
neighbor as open to successful mechanis- 
tic inspection. If not by the eye alone, then 
by the help of the microscope, especially 
as brought to bear upon our neighbor's 
brain-substance, do these activities of a 
foreign mind presumably stand open to our 
investigation. 

Taken in a limited sense, this thesis must 
be accepted and even defended in the interests 
of the mechanistic doctrine. At the same 



76 The Game of Mind 

time, however, there is nothing in the theo- 
retical situation thus introduced which 
will supply the doctrine's opponents with 
substantial critical material. 

In the first place, it must be realized that 
the eye, and its aid the microscope, have 
their broad mechanistic limitations, as well 
as their narrow mechanistic uses. For, on 
the one hand, the relative amount of bodily 
activity resident in the eyes is small; and on 
the other hand, the eyes exercise but a very 
partial control over the bodily activities 
which lie beyond themselves. The crackling 
and warmth of a winter's fire, as appropriated 
by ourselves, and the aroma and flavor of 
roasted coffee, are, for example, wholly 
extravisual perceptions. 

But over and above this natural limitation 
on the part of the eyes as mechanistic gate- 
ways to the bodily activities, it must be 
admitted, of course, that our bodily activities 
are related to perceived, extrabodily things 
— e. g., a neighbor's body or brain — only as 
processes which have been urged or stimu- 
lated into being are related to the environ- 
mental reality or realities which, indirectly, 
furnish the energistic stimulus thereto. 

On this basis, the suggested experiment of 



The Game of Mind 77 

seeing our neighbor's thoughts and feelings, 
as such, becomes a question of living in 
duplicate, in our own body, these very- 
thoughts and feelings. And this under 
the very meager stimulus of the rays of 
light coming from the illuminated body- or 
brain-substance under examination. Here 
certainly is a task regarding the general pos- 
sibility of which the mechanistic doctrine 
can offer no guarantee. Mind-reading as a 
perfected art is doubtless as impossible of 
mechanistic solution as " squaring the circle' ' 
is of geometrical solution. 

However we are able to point to partial 
successes in this direction. For example, 
our interpretation of certain facial expres- 
sions in terms of mental content is an item 
belonging to the art of mind-reading. The 
same is true of lip-reading as practiced by 
the deaf. In future, provided suitable means 
be discovered whereby the brain and body 
of a second person can be watched in their 
normal activity, evolution may still institute 
in man a vastly more comprehensive mecha- 
nistic art of mind-reading. 

As the third and last criticism to be dis- 
cussed we will take one which had the 
advocacy of Lord Kelvin. Otherwise it 



78 The Game of Mind 

would seem hardly to require serious atten- 
tion here. The criticism is based upon a 
suggested possibility of reversal in the 
activities of cosmic mechanisms. Applying 
this idea to mechanistic man we obtain the 
anomaly of a completely reversed organic 
life, bodily death and senescence coming first 
in order of time, and childhood and birth 
coming last of all. For suppose, says the 
argument, that all the atoms of the uni- 
verse were to have, all of an instant, their 
directions of motion reversed, but their 
velocities conserved. Then is the paradox 
accomplished, provided only that man him- 
self is a mechanism. 

Now this supposed damaging corollary 
to the mechanistic doctrine is not only 
gratuitous, it is contrary to its very spirit. 
For the spirit of the mechanistic doctrine is 
analytic rather than synthetic. It is taking 
things as given, rather than imagining them 
other than they are. Let it indeed be ad- 
mitted that it is possible to conjecture matter 
as a congeries of simple atoms darting hither 
and thither in a commonplace and reversible 
sort of way. Then it follows that this sup- 
posititious system evolves backwards and 
forwards with equal theoretical facility. But 



The Game of Mind 79 

to regard the eccentricities of this hopeless- 
ly crude scheme of simple atoms and rever- 
sibility as a suitable basis for criticizing the 
mechanistic doctrine is absurd. For the fact 
is that the real world of matter (whatever it 
is) is apparently not a reversible organic and 
inorganic affair at all. That world moves 
ever onward, and seeming local reversals 
depend entirely upon the contingency of a 
limited and superficial point of view. So 
long as water persists in running down hill, 
the mechanistic doctrine need have no fear 
of the specter of reversibility. 

In conclusion, we are well content to 
believe that our mechanistic conception of 
mind stands finer in its concreteness and 
consistency than it possibly could on any 
so-called higher but illusory basis. With a 
sort of satisfaction we should put ourselves 
in the introspective frame of mind of ad- 
mitting that our ever changing mentality 
has its full source and flow in the organic 
life of the bod}^. Of admitting that per- 
ceiving, conceiving, knowing, etc., are after 
all only finer sorts of bodily living. That 
remembering means reconstitution. That 
feeling is a discussion. That consciousness 



80 The Game of Mind 

is self-analysis. That mental evolution, for 
its part, is a selective and mutatory hand- 
ing on from the past, as a mechanistic gift 
to the present and future, of the great bodily 
Game of Mind. 



' i '::: ; -r»ii!:'^'# 



m 



n 






m 



HUWrn ; < I ■ 



■ 



■ 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




013 312 523 1 






H 



m-tm 






I 



I 



■T 



■ 



■ I 






